and on your tenure here in the house. you will be missed. the jackson-vanik amendment, mr. speaker, was a product of the cold war. when the communist threat was ever present, communist countries had little or no rights. as mr. rohrabacher, our friend from california, just said, we need to recognize that today's russia while hardly a perfect place when it comes to human rights and political expression is not the soviet union. we need a positive framework, economic, political, social, to move forward. this pntr, normalizing trade relations, allows us to wrangle with russia when we think they are wrong in trade disputes at the world trade organization. absent this normalization, we don't have that leverage. furthermore, the committee is to be really commended as is my colleague from massachusetts, mr. mcgovern, for creating a statutory framework for addressing one of the most egregious human rights violations in modern russian history involving sergei magnitsky. this framework could ultimately be a model, frankly, as we move forward in other parts of the world as well, but it certainl
